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Monday, April 13, 2015

The Longest Ride Released on the Big Screen!!

Nicholas Sparks has made a fortune off American nostalgia.

His
books are written on the assumption that, on some fundamental level, we
all want to live in a different time, with different values. We long for
something better, or at least for something extraordinary.

Some of his books and subsequently
successful film adaptations have been set in the past. The bestseller
and box-office hit “The Notebook” takes place in the 1940s. While others
are set in the present, the characters are endowed with anachronistic
temperaments.

The latest Sparks film, “The Longest
Ride,” which released in cinemas April 10 2015 attempts to combine both tropes (the past and present-day
characters who long for the past), for double the nostalgia and, one
imagines, double the ticket sales.

Synopsis:

Ira Levinson is in trouble. Ninety-one years old and stranded and
injured after a car crash, he struggles to retain consciousness until a
blurry image materializes beside him: his beloved wife Ruth, who passed
away nine years ago. Urging him to hang on, she forces him to remain
alert by recounting the stories of their lifetime together - how they
met, the precious paintings they collected together, the dark days of
WWII and its effect on them and their families. Ira knows that Ruth
can't possibly be in the car with him, but he clings to her words and
his memories, reliving the sorrows and everyday joys that defined their
marriage.

A few miles away, at a local bull-riding event, a Wake
Forest College senior's life is about to change. Recovering from a
recent break-up, Sophia Danko meets a young cowboy named Luke, who bears
little resemblance to the privileged frat boys she has encountered at
school. Through Luke, Sophia is introduced to a world in which the
stakes of survival and success, ruin and reward -- even life and death -
loom large in everyday life. As she and Luke fall in love, Sophia finds
herself imagining a future far removed from her plans -- a future that
Luke has the power to rewrite . . . if the secret he's keeping doesn't
destroy it first.

Ira and Ruth. Sophia and Luke. Two couples who
have little in common, and who are separated by years and experience.
Yet their lives will converge with unexpected poignancy, reminding us
all that even the most difficult decisions can yield extraordinary
journeys: beyond despair, beyond death, to the farthest reaches of the
human heart.